Cash and Payments: The Sustainability Forum

The inaugural Cash & Payments Sustainability Forum, which will take place 15-16 November in Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, will share best practice, promote cooperation and address specific environmental challenges and solutions in the cash and payments arena.

Organised by Reconnaissance International, publishers of last year’s white paper ‘Cash: a Roadmap to Sustainability’, the event is specifically styled as a forum as opposed to a conference to focus on practitioners and decision makers. It is about adding value so that everybody learns, thinks, networks and comes away better able to develop policy, assess performance and options, work with others and implement new ideas.

The Forum will be in five parts.

Setting the scene

Sustainability has created an industry with acronyms, abbreviations, terminology, metrics and accreditations for each and every part. We will run sessions to provide a common understanding, a base line, for where the sustainability ‘industry’ is relevant to what we do. As part of this we will consider the areas of challenge, complexity, confusion and risk.

We will also consider the role of the central bank, ISO14001, ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reports, greenwashing, top down and/or bottom-up change.

Best practice

We know there are great examples of organisations, central banks, private and government owned suppliers, making significant progress reducing their environmental impact. We will give them the opportunity to share what they have done and with what result.

We also want to cover topics such as how central banks can reduce the impact of cash and the cash cycle, how to commission an LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) or CFA (Carbon Footprint Analysis) and how to move ESG from greenwashing to being a programme driver. Across cash production and cash handling, what makes a difference and what is the commitment and cost?

Co-operation

We want to highlight the benefits of co-operation supplier to supplier, and at a cash cycle level, ie. the cash cycle end-to-end offers opportunities for standardising packaging, standardising materials, reusing materials, data sharing to optimise cash movements, process changes regulated by central banks etc.

We have the real example of cross-industry co-operation in the experience of the UK’s Cash Industry Environmental Charter group and there will be others.

Staff engagement is good for morale and is a powerful driver of change and progress. We will look at how this can be done.

Specific challenges

Specific challenges range from agreeing industry wide metrics for ESG reports and LCAs, establishing appropriate criteria to include in tenders, and what weighting to give them, disposing of notes at the end of life, green energy purchasing, deciding when carbon offsetting is right and how to do it well, reducing ATM energy use and the use of fossil fuels for cash movements.

Technology focus

We have seen work on everything from capturing and reusing heat, energy generation, wastewater management, end of life solutions, achieving a ‘circular’ economy and re-purposing of track and trace solutions to enable reuse of materials and plastic separation. We will focus on how technology can help sustainability – looking both at innovations within the industry and examples from other industries.

A Call for Papers has now been issued. More information can be found at cashandpaymentsustainabilityforum.com.